28 August 2014

Following closely after the first engine run of the Trent XWB-97 in July, the engine has achieved full takeoff power of 97,000 lbs.

Alistair McIntosh, Chief Engineer for the Trent XWB-97, said: “Reaching 97,000 lbs of thrust is another important milestone for us. Like the saying goes ‘you need to learn to walk before you can run’, so we’ve been building up thrust levels over the last couple of weeks to understand how the engine performs against our models, before hitting full thrust.” The engine will continue to test over the coming weeks to further explore the function and operability of the Trent XWB-97 design, across various thrusts and maneuvers.

“What impresses me most is the amount of running we’ve been able to do so far with this engine and how quickly we’ve done it. It really shows how far we’ve come with our design techniques and tools,” added Alistair. “We’re also coming from a solid baseline of having so much experience of the -84 engine. What we need to do now is to execute the program we’ve set out, continue running this engine, and getting more -97 engines on to the test beds.”